The Magus - John Fowles [111]
manner and appearance; if a man was with her, he went to bed with her. And as I talked, I wondered how we were going to survive the next three days. I tipped the boy and he left the room. She went to the window and looked down across the broad white quay, the slow crowds of evening strollers, the busy port. I stood behind her. After a moment's swift calculation I put my arm around her and at once she leant against me. "I hate cities. I hate airplanes. I want to live in a cottage in Ireland." "Why Ireland?" "Somewhere I've never been." I could feel the warmth, the willingness to surrender, of her body. At any moment she would turn her face and I would have to kiss her. "Alison, I... don't quite know how to break the news." I took my arm away, and stood closer to the window, so that she could not see my face. "I caught a disease two or three months ago. Well... syphilis." I turned and she gave me a look--concern and shock and incredulity. "I'm all right now, but... you know. I can't possibly..." "You went to a..." I nodded. The incredulity became credulity. "You had your revenge." She came and put her arms round me. "Oh Nicko, Nicko." I said over her head, "I'm not meant to have oral or closer contact for at least another month. I didn't know what to do. I ought never to have written. This was never really on." She let go of me and went and sat on the bed. I saw I had got myself into a new corner; she now thought that this satisfactorily explained our awkwardness till then. She gave me a kind, gentle little smile. "Tell me all about it." I walked round and round the room, telling her about Patarescu and the clinic, about the poetry, even about the venture at suicide, about everything except Bourani. After a while she lay back on the bed, smoking, and I was unexpectedly filled with a pleasure in duplicity, with that pleasure, I imagined, Conchis felt when he was with me. In the end I sat on the end of bed. She lay staring up at the ceiling. "Can I tell you about Pete now?" "Of course." I half listened, playing my part, and suddenly began to enjoy being with her again; not particularly with Alison, but being in this hotel bedroom, hearing the murmur of the evening crowds below, the sound of sirens, the smell of the tired Aegean. I felt no attraction and no tenderness for her; no real interest in the stormy break-up of her long relationship with the boor of an Australian pilot; simply the complex, ambiguous sadness of the darkening room. The light had drained out of the sky, it became rapid dusk. All the treacheries of modern love seemed beautiful, and I had my great secret, safe, locked away. It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy: there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie. There was a long silence. She said, "Where are we, Nicko?" "How do you mean?" She was leaning on her elbow, staring at me, but I wouldn't look round at her. "Now I know--of course..." She shrugged. "But I didn't come to be your old chum." I put my head in my hands. "Alison, I'm sick of women, sick of love, sick of sex, sick of everything. I don't know what I want. I should never have asked you to come." She looked down, seemingly tacitly to agree. "The fact is... well, I suppose I have a sort of nostalgia for a sister at the moment. If you say fuck that--I understand. I have no right not to understand." "All right." She looked up again. "Sister. But one day you'll be cured." "I don't know. I just don't know." I looked suitably distraught. "Look--please go away, curse me, anything, but I'm a dead man at the moment." I went to the window. "It's all my fault. I can't ask you to spend three days with a dead man." "A dead man I once loved." A long silence crept between us. But then she briskly sat up and got off the bed; went and switched on the light and combed her hair. She produced the jet earrings I had left that last day in London and put them on; then lipstick. I thought of Lily, of lips without lipstick; coolness, mystery, elegance. It seemed almost marvellous, to be so without